Pseud's Corner Part 7

For multiple disservices to literature and human dignity, this week's Order of the Brown Nose goes to Jennifer Byrne, host of ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. The list of the pseudy talents on display in her most recent First Tuesday website update really only starts with public brown-nosing of much-loved writers; apart from the general air of unreconstructed self-love and clubbyness, there's the excrutiating pretention ("we laughed like drains" etc), unselfconscious use of cliche's ("that grand old man" etc) and boganic glossy magazine slang (the Book Industry Awards could've been "glammer" etc). Oh, and the generous plug she gives her own interview with Christopher Hitchens in the same breath as announcing that he has cancer.CS

"Another week, another literary prize... last week it was the turn of young Craig Silvey, who took out the industry's Book of the Year with his terrific story of life and a mysterious death in a country town, Jasper Jones. I was sitting at the back of Paddington Town Hall next to that grand old man of letters Tom Keneally, - always blissful company - who scored big applause for his win in the non-fiction category. These Book Industry Awards aren't perhaps as glam as some others but what I like about them is they honour not just writers but the lesser-known people who make the publishing world spin: booksellers, distributors, illustrators, publishers. Though the anxiety in the room about the rise of the e-book was palpable. Lots of passionate speeches in support of the paper-and-ink version - the "heritage delivery system", as the marketers might say. - As for my own reading - well, you can't get much more heritage than Tolstoy's epic Anna Karenina, nominated by many as the greatest novel ever written. . .

Thanks for your reading suggestions last month. I can tell you which clubber suggested Curtis Settlefield's An American Wife, it was Amanda Keller on our Christmas show last year - along with the unforgettable Me Cheeta, a spoof celebrity biography by the world-weary chimp in the Tarzan pictures. We all laughed like drains - assuming she was joking - but had to eat our cackles [eat our own kaka?] when it turned up on the the 2009 Booker Prize longlist!

And even though it is the second Tuesday of the month, a reminder to tune in July 13 for my special half-hour interview with the brilliant, mouthy contrarian Christopher Hitchens. This is a man who could charm birds from the trees. And then roast them for dinner as punishment for being so easily seduced. Funny, pugnacious - and at the moment, I imagine, absolutely devastated. He was out promoting his 11th book and first memoir, Hitch-22, when advised that he'd been diagnosed with cancer; he immediately pulled out of the tour to start chemo treatment. But he's in scintillating form in this interview - and the full hour version will go up on the First Tuesday site." (Jennifer Byrne, "What I'm reading" First Tuesday Book Club online)

***

On Fanoodling

It's been non-stop fanoodling here on The Great Stage since Julian Meyrick fanoodled his way to a really prominent corner of the Corner of Shame in edition no. 6 and revealed to us with the f*ck-you appassionata of a man of true conviction - not only that Beckett's immortal Waiting for Godot is a moral lesson in . . . waiting, but also what Vlad and Estr really get up to in the course of the play. Of course they despair, but, more importantly, they fanoodle. They fanoodle so significantly that the great gullet of Australian cultural unresponsiveness opens wide and emits . . . funny noises. Feeling almost certain that Dr Meyrick wasn't suggesting he'd seen Ian McKellen and co. "messing round on a couch" doing something "like cuddling, only better" - as a quick trip to the Urban Dictionary seemed to indicate - we asked readers to tell us what they thought Meyrick really meant - deep down. Today, the results are in.    

A SHIFTING, shuffling, furrowing, cogitating noise. A cross between a wheeze, a sigh and a snort of determination. This is the sound emitting from the Comedy Theatre at the moment. The sound of Australians facing up to Culture. . . That Waiting for Godot should be presented commercially 50 years after it was damned by New York critic Walter Kerr as "a play in which nothing happens, twice" suggests either the world has lost its mind, or changed it. Beckett's two tramps, fanoodling and despairing their days away waiting for a mysterious Godot who never appears, is stamped on our collective consciousness as the archetypal existential statement. A ditch, a tree, a few guys killing time. That's it, folks. After all the unwanted Christmas presents, great loves, political upheavals, promotions, demotions, technical advances, broken marriages and lost biros, that what we're left with. That's life. - A production of Waiting for Godot is a compelling event because it is still an affront to theatre-going sensibilities. Or once again an affront. Discontinuity is the dominant mode of the modern world, as we frazzle and fragment in unrelenting competitive locomotion. Harried, hurried and chronically overwhelmed, waiting of any kind has been banished, an unmitigated bad. So Beckett's tramps, who literally do nothing for two hours, is a poke in the eye, a ''f**k you'' from beyond the grave. Having to sit in the theatre and think for a prolonged period demands skills all but forgotten, like tuning a crystal set. Something more is required, a quality of attention we reserve only for things that touch us deeply. Things that really matter. (Julian Meyrick, "Beckett can teach us how to wait", The Age)

So, were Vlad and Estr fanoodling, as in:

(a) canoodling in fcuk apparell (Daniel Pilkington)?

(b) "fail-noodling" - i.e. failing to use their noodles - presumably to agree on a departure strategy once it became clear that Godot was putting in a no-show (Sam Waters)?

(c) squeezing the wrong end of the sauce bottle (Kevin Rudd)?

OR

(d) running around with their underpants on their heads being boisterously expressive, i.e. acting (Larissa Harrison)?

The free lunch voucher I think clearly goes to . . . Mr Pilkington.

***

For my part – and in this forum for intimate, writerly expression – I’ve got to openly submit here to conceding that for the longest time I’ve resented the contention that a tactile, geographical environment impacts on the quality of an author’s work. I do, however, freely and cordially embrace the notion that a physical, authorial space administers a significant influence upon a writer’s work ethic. - For wherever I work – be this sprawling over and scrawling onto the leg of an armchair – be this conveniently adopting the Yellow Pages as both a makeshift desk and seer-stone for its infinite supply of barbarous character names – be this scrawling my linguistically anomalous breed of hieroglyph into water-choked moleskines, or onto the backs of lurid junkmail pamphleteering the services of professional suburban podiatrists moonlighting as dental technicians – be this writing with my fingertip into granulated mounds of sugar, or into nuggets of spilled coffee grounds, before palming my idle attempts at kitchen literature into my enamel-ware mug and consuming these same imperfect sentences with soy milk so sweet I can almost mask the bitter taste of haphazard syntax – for wherever my compulsion to write seizes me, my stamina for producing is dependent upon a space where personal comfort reigns supreme. (Kirk Marshall, "Kirk Marshall's Literary Space" LiteraryMinded)

The Advancement Solutions Consultant is responsible for analysing client requirements and providing complex data reports to the advancement community of the University. The position is required to play a pivotal role in the development and documentation of technical procedures for managing information across the Advancement system portfolio. Furthermore, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will develop standard reports that replace ad hoc reports using the business intelligence reporting tool (Microsoft SQL Server BI) by adhering to the report development lifecycle. - The incumbent will also be responsible for providing assistance and making business process improvements across the Advancement system portfolio. - Additionally, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will manage new customizations and configurations to advancement systems and conduct system and user acceptance testing on applicable environments with other team members. (University of Melbourne, "WANTED: Advancement Solutions Consultant - Advancement Office, Deputy Vice Chancellor (University Affairs))

By day three, we were total ratbags. Our American companion had morphed into ‘Dingo Dave’. Ascending a sharp incline, we found Jennifer Byrne [Why, hello again!] rolling on the ground in paroxysms of laughter. Linda Jaivin’s description of the plot twists in her Song dynasty opera scenario grew more baroque with every mile. Raymond, now bereft of any hope that we might be capable of shutting up for even the shortest time, announced that he had decided to let us talk. I pumped him for dirt on Doc Neeson and the Angels. Conversation ranged across topics from Cormac McCarthy to the difference between a cad and a bounder to cheap eats in Istanbul. Only rarely did we encounter other walkers, groups of older folk mostly, with serious expressions and ski-stock walking sticks. They looked scandalised as we trooped past singing selections from The Sound of Music. ("Shane Maloney opens his diary", The Spectator Australia)

[The latest album]'s many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google. A lot of the criticisms of M.I.A. have focused on her lack of a coherent politics, the questionable ethics of her aestheticization of poverty, and the hypocrisies of her privileged lifestyle. With albums as vital and original as Arular and Kala, it was easy to defend her deterritorializations as a valid artistic strategy, a method of salvaging the radical moment and making it resonate with a Western audience weaned on hip-hop's valorization of the outlaw. The Hirschbergs of the world are wrong when they attempt to bring M.I.A. to task for these perceived ethical violations, when her body of work is more productively viewed as a series of politically charged portraits in which that naïveté is essential to the revolutionary urgency she seeks to bring to the dancefloor. Unfortunately, this time out, M.I.A. just hasn't given us enough to work with. (Jonathan Dean reviews MIA, Tiny Mix Tapes. Tip of the hat for a close reading of this spasming hypertext to Matt Wendus)

Hyland’s writing, which has only increased in strangeness with each new book, emerges from a shifting of co-ordinates between cold-eyed clinician and artist’s empathetic heart. Her characters are constructed from the tension between autistic remove and panting proximity; her narratives energised by the insertion of wildly disturbed individuals into drab, constricted worlds. And her style? As Harold Pinter once said of his work, “What goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.” (Geordie Williamson, The Australian)


[Spotters: ONR, BG, CMcC, ACG] 

The Art of Having Something to Say Part 10: Lichtenberg

"When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee. . ." and Other Aphorisms 

1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.

1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.

1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.

1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .

1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.

1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.

1.32 When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.

1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.

1.38 To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .

2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.

2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.

2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].

2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.

2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.

2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .

2.30 He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Russell Jacoby: The Last Intellectuals

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) runs the argument that post-war America down to the late 1980's saw a notable decline in intellectual life, the near-total extinction of the figure of the public intellectual. "The disappearance of general intellectuals into professions" diagnosed in the book is, however, no one-dimensional decline and fall - it reflects a much wider fracturing of the public domain, though it also follows an institutional logic of its own; unique to the story for Jacoby is a loss of political and intellectual nerve on the part of a whole generation of writers, thinkers and scholars located in and around cities and university campuses.

The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.

From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)

***

Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.

The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.

In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .

The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.

The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.

"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "

Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS